Grim (1995) Online

Just a couple of times in your lifetime, you will come across a movie so bad, so horrendously, appallingly bad, that your eyes will light up and your mouth will start to salivate in the delight of it all.

Grim is one of these movies.

Right from the opening credits you know it, and by about half way through, you are beyond amusement - your lower lip will hang, slackly separated from your upper one, and your eyes will be vacantly gazing at the screen. Your brain will hate you for watching this movie.

The opening credits look like a cheap screensaver, and go on for minutes. No action, typical orchestral horror music, a black screen and some words. Finally, it finishes, and an inexplicable four second shot of some kind of underground stone casket is shown. It looks like polystyrene. The first real scene is the old ouija board trick with a bunch of teenagers in a bedroom. Well, actually, it's two guys in their mid-thirties and some 21-year-old girls, in what looks like a very cold and dark basement. There is no reason for them to be together, to be there, and to not have grown out of using ouija boards.

The acting is woeful, the editing looks deliberately shoddy (a few shots run on for about 3 seconds too long, after the action has finished, leaving you awkwardly staring), and the visual effects...well, I don't know whose brainchild the Grim actually was, but I'm guessing he's made of rubber and had a terrible childhood.

Despite references to Greek mythology (well someone carries a ball of string around a cave) and the Brothers Grimm, this Grim is the same tedious man in a monster suit movie you've probably seen way too many times before. The thrust of the plot has four dull types with the help of a a Ouija board, inadvertently unleashing Grim- a troll monster who kidnaps Wendy a female member of their number. With houses subsiding and housewives disappearing due to the monster's uncouth penchant for materialising in people's living rooms, a bickering couple are called in to investigate the local caves. They're joined of course by the remaining Ouija board users who fail to tell them about the obese troll that waits below or Wendy whose been stripped down to her underwear and tied up, yes its another cautionary tale of the dangers of `new age crap'. A high tolerance for endless scenes of people running around in caves is required for Grim, a cheap mosaic of a movie desperately stitched from several other pictures although I never thought I'd see a film that owed so much debt to 1986's Rawhead Rex. Grim makes some concessions towards the gore market with severed hands and heads waved at the audience, but the ‘meat shots' also conprise the films most unintelligible moments. The first murder frankly makes no sense at all, closely followed by what appears to be a disembowelling but actually seems more like Grim cutting up a Christmas turkey, the continuity reaches such appalling depths that when Grim decapitates a victim near the end you are actually unsure of whose head has been chopped off! Grim's director Paul Matthews with the help of assorted relatives also made Breeders (1996) an only slightly superior feature showcasing a sex crazed alien ‘loosting' after schoolgirls, there were plans for a Grim 2 but sanity must have prevailed. Interestingly Grim has never surfaced in the UK, although Breeders did manage to gather dust on the video shelves, no doubt due to the presence of several low rent celebrities in the cast like Oliver ‘The Stud' Tobias and Samantha Janus. Of the two, Breeders has the meagre edge, if only because it subscribes to a strange rhetoric that the lead actresses bum was allot more interesting than anything else. Both are ‘transatlantic' productions- read a British film that goes to fanatical extremes to pretend its American, and are frequently hilarious for that reason. Note those accents that occasional slip into twangs that are anything but Virginian or that the film quickly sends its heros into caves masking the location. Not however before the film's funniest shot, one of the characters drives through what couldn't pass for anything other than a droll English suburb so its a jot when the car stops revealing a sticker bearing the legend `Virginia Mining Company'. Grim also has a legacy that lives up to its title, a few years after the film's release actress Kadamba Simmons (billed here as Kadamba) was strangled in the shower by a crazed ex-boyfriend. This turn of events lends unexpected sadness and pathos to her roles in both Grim and Breeders (where she played a scared women dominated by an alien monster) that neither the scripts, direction or acting of the model turned budding actress really deserve. As a result however, parts of Grim such as when she's tied down by her insane psychic husband or covered in blood now seem on a gut-emotional level, hard to watch. If you were really being generous (and I doubt anyone suffering through Grim would be) it could be argued that the Matthews are producing films very much in the manner of the cheap British Exploitation films turned out in the Fifties and Sixties. Theres an almost Butchers Film Distributors edge to Grim's pathetic transatlantic tone which echos the legendary Sixties sweatshop's hiring of faded American and Canadian matinee idols in an attempt to have their movies released in some countries as opposed to some counties. Ironically both Breeders and Grim appear to reach logical conclusions around the 60 minute mark, the ideal ‘programmer' time. Sadly Grim is just another tragedy story, bearing the conclusion that theres a genuine scarcity of the filmmaking savvy needed to pull off a wild horror/exploitation film piece among the people currently producing ‘Britschlock'. Coming across less a bunch of films than a celluloid rogues galley- Death Machine, Proteus, Beyond Bedlam and Pervirella- make good the reasons why the Matthews would be cagey about revealing their local, but utterly workmanlike ‘product' like this isn't going to rock the world either. Its unfortunate then that Grim unambitious and shallow a project as it is, is only really successful in its Anglo-Saxon apeing of the very worse of the direct to video market.

I won't recap the plot to Grim in much detail - mainly because it doesn't really have much of one. And that's a shame, as underneath the long, ponderous shots, terrible dialogue and shaky script there's a reasonable enough movie trying to get out. Unfortunately, it never does, though, leaving Grim a plodding, un-involving mess.

As a first draft or a plot synopsis, Grim's script would be acceptable in the "simple plot, let's just get on with the scares" school of horror. However, it's supposed to be a finished movie. Even the heavy-handed addition of a "Basil Exposition" character, to actually explain that the creature is a troll and explain troll-ish behaviour to the rest of the cast/viewer (i.e. they live underground, eat people, don't like light) would have been a move in the right direction.

And speaking of direction, in Grim, it's pretty woeful. There isn't a single moment in this movie that makes you jump. Not one. And, with the lackluster editing and terribly repetitive soundtrack, Grim can't be recommended.

THAT SAID, I do at least give credit to the cast and crew for trying something different. And, given the choice, I'd still take Grim over any of the Hugh Grant/Richard Curtis Rom-Coms about stuttery, up-tight Englishmen and their will they/won't they romantic complications...

Terrible film about an evil, ancient monster who lives underground, but sometimes comes up to munch on the residents of an upper class neighborhood. Silly, slowing moving, and dull pic with cheap looking effects and over the top acting and no logic to boot. Even at around 86 mins. this feels way too long. A total wash. Rated R; Graphic Violence.

I watched this crap about 2 years ago on cable. I wasted 90 mins. of my life, I could've done anything else.

There was no plot, acting, direction, or reason to make this movie! The monster is extremely cheesy and cheap. There is no gore or even a false scare. The underground setting promised a little, but it got pretty old after 15 mins. There was no tension or creepy atmosphere. One of the worst slasher movies I've seen, and believe me, I've seen TERRIBLE slasher movies. This is beyond mediocrity, please avoid it.

0/10. Bury it!

This movie was so bad that I wasn't able to get through the whole thing, however I was able to get through enough of it to come up with a pretty good idea that this movie sucks big time. Look at the star rating it currently has for crying out loud!!! (Note: the star rating is currently at 1.8) The story to this film makes no sense at all, and the whole idea of this movie being scary is a joke. The effects are awful and the acting is even worse. I've seen some bad movies, but at least they were ever so slightly tolerable. I should have known that this film sucked when the credits started rolling and I was unable to recognize (or even pronounce) the cast list. It's my own fault for not seeing that this was a bad movie. Look at the box cover! The creature looks like a Sesame Street puppet, only, not as scary.

For a super low-bugdet horror flick such as this you just aren't going to have oscar winning material. The plot leaves several things unanswered and that's it's major flaw. The acting in my opinion is better than most for a "B" horror film. The props and set design in the cave/dungeon was fairly interesting. The CGI effects in the film were better than average for a 1995 film. While this isn't the greatest film, it's still good for a late night viewing just for it's pure cheese appeal. I'd still prefer this over any of those trendy teen horror films at the box office recently!

This has got to be the absolute worse piece of trash I have ever seen in my entire life, and trust me I've seen my share of bad movies. The killer creature looks like a person in a rubber suit, the acting is terrible, the direction plodding, the so called special effects are an eye sore. A complete and utter waste of time and money.

A team of spelunkers, when investigating a system of caves beneath a small town, come across a hideous creature that can move through walls that was recent awoken from it's ancient slumber by a group of teens. I'll give the film credit where it's due: The effort was there. The idea of a creature that can move through walls is also kind of original. What doesn't work? just about everything else. Poor pacing, very weak acting (The opening scene with the Ouija board stood out in my mind especially), terrible lighting, awkward dialog, and cheesy visual effects, especially when the creature moves through walls. Now there are some bad special effects for you. It's not as ghastly as others have made it out to be, and the creature effects are no where near as bad as some say, but it needed a bigger budget and better actors, which it didn't have. Shame.

3/10.

There's a lot of walking in this movie. People walk up and down, side to side and all over! There are even scene's where the characters walk off into the background while the camera stays at the scene for unnecessarily long times. But they continued walking. My legs hurt after I watched this movie. So if you like walking, then this movie is for you.

Boy... what the hell did I put myself through? GRIM felt and looked like a third rate Full Moon movie (it was equally crap), only it's not. So that makes it a lesser movie (anyone following my logic?). The Grimmie-creature was fun to look at... but the movie wasn't. At one point I got so bored, I found myself making up lyrics for a song about... GRIM.

The song's called... "Grimstink". A band called Grimfist inspired me with the title. It's supposed to be a gore-grind-death-metal song (so if you want to sing along, makes sure you growl the words in such a manner that no-one understands them). The content of the lyrics, is designed to at least give you some idea about what's up with this movie. And yes, the chorus is loosely based on "Maze Of Torment" by Morbid Angel. Here we go...

------------

"GRIMSTINK"

Where do women go? - What does Grimmie know? - Are they used for food? - Or there just to look good?

Grimmie do the moan - Grimmie gimme growl - Grimmie made of foam - Grimmie looks so foul.

CHORUS: Grim! - Caves of torment - Stink! - Caves of death

Why go down the cave? - Above, much more safe - Simply makes no sense - Geef mij maar witte pens

Grimmie hangs around - Grimmie looks at lens - Always underground - Until this movie ends

Grimmie looks around - Nothing to be found - Grimmie looks some more - This movie is a bore

CHORUS (x2): Grim! - Caves of torment - Stink! - Caves of death

------------

Man what a waste of an hour of my life this movie was. It has absolutely no point; it is only somewhat gory; it has a bad combination of terrible acting/sound/lighting/camera; it's just bad!

We start off with people doing a Ouija board, and what do you know? It spells out Grim! So then he comes to life underground and goes through walls somehow and kills people, or brings them down to his underground cave/lair/thing. So then people go spelunking and get killed one by one in really dumb, stereotypical ways. (Hey I'm gonna go off alone, AHHHHHH I'm dead) And then there is something about possession, and a bell and some other stuff. You're left going, "What the heck?" The only good part of this entire movie is at the end, when this one girl who got chained up (She was possessed or something?) is screaming and slamming the chains and trying to get out, cus the other guys left, and Grim is a statue now. So it ends with her in mid scream. Also, Grim looks terrible! He looks better on the cover then he does throughout the entire movie. I mean you can see that its a mask, its very blatant. Well thats it, DO NOT SEE THIS MOVIE!

I can believe people didn't like this movie.. Of course the visual effects are crap & the plot is nothing... But its soo classic.... Its funny beyond belief...

& think about how kvlt it is...

Its called Grim & its about a Man eating Troll that lives underground. How heavy metal is that?? Very!!! Who cares if what he does is Cheesy... Just get real p***ed & laugh your head off!

A must for classic horror fans!

I rented Grim in the hopes of watching a truly awesome bad movie -- the kind so awful, and unintentionally hilarious, that it becomes something new, something different. It has, paradoxically, become a "good" movie (i.e. Troll II).

Unfortunately, for Grim, it was neither bad enough to be good, or good enough to be good. While it came close at times (definitely in the case of the former), it was always short of true greatness.

Bad movie score: 5/10 Good movie score: 3/10

This IS a BAD movie. People get a couple of bucks together, write a hackneyed script, find someone who attempts to do the latest in special effects, hire some local "talent"(?) and you've got this kind of result.

This show was so loaded with mistakes, you wonder if the people responsible for this show are really that stupid. Have they never seen a horror movie? Did they pay any attention when they watched the movie? It would be nice if these independent types would just try to do something right. Let's face it, there are things that can be done cheaply, and they still come out being pretty good. Look at the works of Sam Katzman, many of the 40's horror movies were made of budgets not much bigger than this, and were tons better.

If you want to sit in disbelief for 86 minutes, having a couple of unintentional laughs, but finally asking "how could anyone do this?", here's your movie.

As Edward Van Sloan said in his introduction for Frankenstein (1931), "Well, you've been warned."

GRIM is a very poor indie horror that escaped from Britain back in 1995. It predates THE DESCENT and THE CAVE in the tale of spelunkers falling foul of a mysterious beast living beneath the ground. This is the kind of film which has dated in the worst way, with mannered character development and lots of unrealistic moments. The film was shot in real caves but they're lit in a way which makes them look fake. I didn't mind the suited monsters or the bloodshed too much, but the script is very much below par and some bad computer graphics really help to date this one.

From the grainy camera quality, low lighting throughout most of the film, and the inexplicable happenstance of several Americans living in what is obviously England yet none of them know or are friends with any Brits to the bad acting, horrible dialog and blatant misogyny and sexploitation, this movie gets it all wrong. The special effects are cheesy, lame, and poorly executed. The monster isn't scary at all and it's constant growling and slow, shuffling gate simply do not inspire the fear that the actors melodramatize into quite the laughable display of the world's worst acting. I am so bored by the plot, constant calling to everyone by their name, and the frequent female screaming and whining. There are twenty more minutes of this horrible film left? It just keeps going. Kill me now! I will never get these 88 minutes of my life back.

A subterranean monster preys upon the locals of a quaint suburban neighborhood. Newcomer, Rob, joins a group of other spelunkers a few of whom have ulterior motives for traveling into the monster's supposedly unknown lair.

A horrible kind of slow (in all senses of the word) movie with incredibly bad acting going up against a shady, plastic looking creature that would be more at home in a Real Housewives Show on Bravo (take your pick which one) but significantly less frightening. Plus at just under ninety minutes, it still feels far longer. Awful film. Writer/Director would return with the moderately more watchable but still pretty bad Breeders.

Don't be fooled by the placement of this movie on the list of 100 worst movies. This is THE worst movie of all time. Worse than Manos. Worse than Hobgoblins. Worse than Space Mutiny. This movie is actually physically painful to watch. At our local Bad Movie Nights we only watch it once every couple months or so because its that bad. AND WE LIKE BAD MOVIES!!! This movie just reeks of garbage. Bad acting, bad script, bad film quality, bad "monster".... its terrible. The only person that comes close to laughable instead of painful is Emmanuel Xuereb. He leads the cast with such random outbursts as "EASY" and "CUT THE CRAP". He also is a master of blowing up foam rocks and when another person says that animals have been being mutilated recently he attributes it to local kids. For anyone thats a fan of his "work" you'll be glad to know he recently appeared in a Docker's commercial (the one with the X-Ray glasses). Anyway this movie is not for the faint hearted and I strongly advise against watching it unless you're strong enough to take it.

"Grim" is actually a pretty decent creature feature.

**SPOILERS**

A series of disappearances plagues a small town, and Rob, (Emmanuel Xuereb) and his wife Penny, (Tres Hanley) decide to take a small assortment of the townspeople, Ken, (Michael Fitzpatrick) his wife Trish, (Nesba Crenshaw) Katie, (Kadamba Simmons) and her boyfriend Steve, (Jack Chancer) and sister Sarah, (Jules De Jongh) into some nearby caves to find the reason of the disappearances. As they get further into the cave, a mining accident strands them below with a vicious creature. As they start to get picked off one-by-one, Steve relates a story that he and some friends had accidentally released the creature earlier. Finally forced to accept the story, they try to work together to find a way out and stop the monster.

The Good News: I don't really know why this is so attacked, it's not all that bad of a film. The underground cave setting is one of the best assets, allowing for tons of suspense moments in the twisting cave designs and outcroppings that are just the right size for hiding behind or concealing the threat. The fact that it also portrays some Gothic influence, with giant cobwebs, low light coming from overhead flashlights and the small lighting coming in naturally, and the eerie mist that always surrounds the areas. Seeing the creature emerge through the mist with the design of the cave-well behind it is a really nice ambiance that is rarely seen nowadays. The slow walking that it moves by makes them all the better, allowing the frame to slowly move through and let the shadow of it come through before detail is seen, making it far more threatening than had it just simply walked through at regular speed. The atmosphere exuded from the cave is a real bright quality for the film, and it works quite well in establishing a menacing tone for the creature. It's actually very threatening on its own, with an impossibly large frame showing huge mass, large claws and fangs, a very scary face and a great overall design. It really looks otherworldly, and is made all the more believable with it being made as a suit rather than CGI. It makes it more 3-dimensional and like it's actually interacting with the cast, and therefore more threatening than if it was a bland computer generated image. It's also not in the slightest shy about piling on the gore, making it a pretty messy film. There is a side of the face bitten off, a head smashed against a rocky outcropping and broken into pieces, a sword up through the neck and out through the head, and several large scar marks on the body, in addition to a massive graveyard of body parts strewn all over. Most of them still have meat on them, and broken bones with muscles and skin still on them are found, conjuring a very gruesome image. Add these together with a fantastic ending half with lots of action and it's a very underrated creature feature.

The Bad News: There's only a couple of small complaints against this film. The biggest one is that the creature is seen far too early in the film for its true shock appearance to the group to have much threat. It's supposed to be a shock to see it, yet the mood is spoiled by having seen it before. Yes, logic is also thrown out the window at times, and several moments in here are pretty groan-inspired, yet it's not overall that bad.

The Final Verdict: Nowhere near as bad as I thought, or what the other reviews peg it out to be. It's a simple creature feature with a great villain, interesting location and a rather by-the-numbers play-out. It's really not as bad as it sounds, though it could use a couple of improvements. Recommended only for the most discriminating creature feature tastes or those that enjoy these kinds of films.

Rated R: Graphic Violence and Graphic Language

I saw this film as a teenager. It was late at night, the film was on some obscure channel. I didn't watch it from the start, but I remember enjoying it. For years I hoped to see it again, but couldn't find the title. Then someone in some discussion group identified the film for me, and naturally I looked it up and found it on the internet. I couldn't wait for it to start, so I could relive this memory.

Well, talk about things not being the way we remember them.

To say that this was a disappointment is an understatement. This film is dull and stupid, with irritating characters, a silly monster, and a plot written by a retard who was feeling particularly lazy and uninspired during the afternoon on which he wrote it.

Just stay away from this, don't waste your life on such rubbish.

A group of spelunkers run afoul of an ugly troll-like monster that can move through walls while investigating a system of caves underneath a small town. Sound good and exciting? Well, it just ain't. For starters, writer/director Paul Matthews crucially fails to generate a single iota of either tension or spooky atmosphere. Moreover, the characters are uniformly insipid and thus fail to elicit any sympathy whatsoever from the viewer. The crummy acting from the lame no-name cast, flatly staged monster attack scenes, generic and redundant hum'n'shiver score, slipshod editing, meandering story, unconvincing won't-fool-you-for-a-second rubbery creature, plodding pace, tacky (markedly less than) special effects, and shoddy gore all add further abject insult to already appalling injury. Worst of all, this turkey lacks the necessary energy and cruddy charm to be enjoyable on a so-bad-it's-good level. Instead it's just a hideously tedious chore to endure. A total wash-out.

I don't typically like cheap horror movies or shall we say cliché but surprisingly I liked this more then I would if it had been made by the sci-fi channel.. (which watching it I realized.. it wasn't a sci-fi channel original because the movie would have been much worse had it been) It actually did have originality unlike a typical sci-fi/horror movie and yah the special effects are just awful (almost looked animated.. yah know before computers) It seemed to me and maybe I'm just wrong but the pacing was terrible, aka there where a lot of useless shots the director couldn't find any thing else to do with.. so he spend 3-5 minutes of celluloid on climbing down a ladder But underneath it all this movie had more heart then your average crap fare.. it had a cave, a sort of interesting premise (call a devil/troll) through a wiji board and sets and or monster looks that where sort of interesting (and sort of terrible) this movie is definitely cheesy and can be appreciated it for it's uniqueness and it's cheese and really not following the formulaic plot lines we expect (there isn't a plot but even for not having one it's.. not formulaic) I also make a note for those interested that this movie has limited bondage scenes; for those looking for it..

I wish people wouldn't focus on crap like acting and realism of costumes.This movie was a lot like and American version of Rawhead Rex. It takes place underground. A cool looking monster goes around killing people.It's better than almost any of those goreless teen horror movies.